Tag Archives: android

Get home and Internet isn’t working…
Power cycled router still nothing; rechecked settings and tried to force connect, nothing.
Call Qwest/CenturyLink … get automated answering system
Go through the steps; press 1, press 2, etc…
Tells me Internet is down in the area and they’re working on it, then it hangs up. -.-
Call back, force AI to put me to a real person…
Real person has no answers except it may take 24 hours to be fixed…
I ask her why? She has no answer, … so I complain about how often service goes down and all they ever say is sorry….
Long silent pause…. then she apologies…
I ask why should I deal with such shitty quality service and help when Comcast is better (though they’re tools of the government and a bit more expensive).
She hangs up on me… bitch…
I enable my free Android WiFi hotspot and go looking at Comcast’s Website
win

So since a lot of people have come to me to ask about Android and apps, or something else android, I thought I’d put up a list of the apps I use most (free and paid). I use apps that I think are best at what they do, or simply because they’re the most fun to play lol. I will separate the apps into “Tablet”, “Phone”, and “Both” and will discuss the apps I find to be the best and what they do.

(These aren’t all the apps, they are the most used and favored apps I have on my devices & I recommend to others)Also: Some of these apps have PC/Mac/Linux counter parts.
(Almost all the games do for sure)

Music:Google Play Music – Music stored in the cloud, no storage needed for my music anymore.

Navigation: Maps – Allows you to use GPS navigation, rate restaurant, check-in to venues, and share your location with friends and family.

Utility Apps:

-= Save my Attach =- – is a great app for saving attachments from those pesky e-mails that have unsupported file types within Android (which as new versions of Android come along is getting to be less)

App Cache Cleaner – a necessary tool on all android devices and should be ran a 2-3 times a week (or more if you have very little space on your phone or own a tablet (On my tablet I run this every 2 days or more, but my tablet is also my primary usage device, use it more than my computer even)

ES File Explorer – THE best file explore there is anywhere on the market. It can create it’s own FTP for remote access to phone or tablet, it can be a root explorer, as well as you can link to LAN computers, FTP servers, and even has built-in Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, Google Drive, and SkyDrive setups ready to go and allows multiple accounts of each. (It has it all, it is an invaluable tool)

DiskUsage – a great app to see how much space is on you SDCard or internal and what is taking up all the space.

920 Text Editor – just your basic text editor, but does one hell of an amazing job

Adobe Flash Player 11.1 – if you want to see flash online you’ll need this app (for Jelly Bean you just have to side load the application (download the .apk and install it manually)

IrssiConnectBot – My favorite app for TTS connecting to my home server, a great too that is similar to PuTTy, but for android

Grocery iQ – Tablet // Grocery iQ– a way for my GF and I to share a grocery list and even have it separated by store and be able to not only have a list, but also scan items into the app. Also it allows you to enter in the price of the item too so you can price check when at other stores or see when a product has changed price

Any.DO – an awesome ToDo list app that syncs with your Google tasks as well as you can share your tasks with your spouse. It is super simple and sleek, simplistic but still perfect.

Key Ring – Remove all those rewards cards from you wallet and purse, go digital with this app and get rid of the clutter!

Mint.com – Keep an eye on all your finances (Bank accounts, Loans, and Credit Cards) with this app. Never go over budget and see where you spend your money most.

For School or Office:

Drive– Google Drive access on the go from anywhere in the world where you get service or WiFi to be able to upload or create documents/spreadsheets/presentations/etc

GetGlue – To check into movies, tv shows, books, games, and more (you earn stickers that you can get in real life in the mail for free), it also allows you to mark the things you like, dislike, or favorite and you can write reviews for them.

HaxSync – Syncs my Facebook friends (all their info like Bday, Email, Phone, Picture, Etc) and calendar (events and birthdays) without having any problems and no need to install the crappy Facebook App

Yelp – Review restaurant you go to and share your love or hatred for a certain establishment with the world right from your phone

Ebook / Digital Reading:

Mantano Reader Premium – The Best ebook/PDF reader there is on the market (buy the year subscription for $10 and sync you library, reading position, highlights, bookmarks, and notes to multiple devices)

Manga Watcher Application – If your a fan of manga, then this app is for you. Get you weekly downloads right to your phone or tablet as well as add your collection you already have to the app.

Other Useful apps:

Translate – Anyone traveling overseas or studying a new language or ran into a foreigner, this app is amazing.

Ancestry – is a great app for viewing and editing my family tree that is stored online in the cloud at their website

Craigslist Mobile – this app is for anyone who loves Craigslist (buying or selling), it is the best app available, though it’s got a slight learning curve but is the best available and fastest

Flixster – For checking showtimes on my tablet or phone, this app is amazing, even has the ability watch the trailers for each movie. As well as you can write and read reviews of films The only thing it is missing is a Fandago button for buying tickets.

Google Voice – to text and make calls from your Google voice number instead of wasting texts (unless you have unlimited) uses data instead to send texts and when paired with SipDroid you can even make calls with Data only saving on minutes.

Tip N Split – Great for those that want to leave a certain amount or % or even split up a bill….

TV Show Favs – Track your favorite TV Shows and know when the next episode is airing.

Unified Remote – Remote for computer a (great if you hook it up to your TV)

OvuView – Menstrual tracker for women (but men can use it to know when they should run and hide and be nice, or come home with random chocolates and flowers).

Voxer – It’s a Walkie-Talkie for android, save on minutes and texts; use data or WiFi to talk with friends with your real voice or send pics/files or texts all from the app.

Tablet:

Games (3 or 4 of these are on my phone, but I thought it best to keep them all together):

ZENONIA4 – Great RPG game on your phone or tablet. I’ve loved this series since #1

Kid Games/Apps:

Kid Mode – THE Best App if you have kids. It is a child lock mode for all android dives and gives kids only access to apps you choose and can’t be unlocked without the password or answering a question. Go to Parent Mode -> You setup an account and “create” your family (add your children to the program) then allow them the apps you want. Then give it to the kids. It’s awesome!!

Cat In The Hat – Great read along book, it’s great to have the book I read as a child available for my daughter to read along with on my tablet

Brilliant Quotes FREE – I like daily quotes from people that are smarter than I and some are very profound, others are freaking hilarious.

ComicRack Free – this is IMO the best digital comic reader on android, it even has a desktop companion for organizing your comics easily, the reading and response of this app is the best I could find and I love it (for a while I even had it on my phone too, it’s that lightweight).

Currents – This is one of my favorite tablet apps. What this app does it takes your favorite news, blog sites, or similar (Forbes, Huffington Post, CNET, TechCrunch, Slash Gear, and 100’s of thousands of others) and delivers them in a easily read (with pictures) to your tablet (or phone) for offline readings.

RedLaser – Scan products at a store or manually enter them to create a wish list, birthday gift list for your kid, wedding registrar, and more, then share the list with who ever; it finds local deals and online deals and even tells you the distance and if the item is in stock.

For School or Office:

CamScanner – Scan documents, white boards, or whatever with your camera and turn them into great looking PDFs to upload/share anywhere

Smart Tools – a set of tools that every phone should have (there are free versions of every tool by other developers, but this app they are all bundled and better, plus I got it for $0.25 on the play store during a sale.

So Lightbox sold out to +Facebook+ and I don’t know what app I should use for photo sharing now… +Streamzoo or Picplz or +Instagram or a different one. I also need a program that will show my +Twitter and Facebook photostreams like Lightbox does on my +Android products…. Any ideas people?

So after all the hype of Beta 1 that I saw in the Nerd stream and Facebook, I decided I needed to go get this amazing app right? Yeah Not so much, there might be potential, but it wasn’t even ready for a beta release; let alone a “Beta 2” that I installed. You know generally in a beta release you have most the kinks worked out and a generally ok working app with maybe a few bugs…. Yeah not these guys, at least not for my experience.. I don’t have an ancient computer either, I can play LoL and WoW as well as PWE games with little to no lag at all… So first thing I see after filling out all the info and registering and setting up sync is this:

As you can see the my screen apparently isn’t wide enough for this program and I have an annoying “suggestion” bar. Are you effing kidding me, if I have an android phone, hell if I’m even installing this program, you can almost bet I know what programs I like on droid, are you seriously going to suggest apps (and shitty ones at that!?).

So I decided that I can get past the resolution thing (it happens, just not usually on my 1024 x 800 screen, I have an old tube monitor still cause it was free from when my own monitor got broke). So anyways, as I’m watching it install and sync my apps like 80% of them are coming back saying something about my graphic card not being able to support the “high” graphics, seriously bitch? LightBox does not use “high graphics” !!! They took their website, made a fucking mobile app out of the damn thing, I can do all the same shit online as the phone and I do it daily!!

I go into use an app first thing after sync finishes, I choose Google Voice, cause they don’t have a desktop app and it’d be cool to have an app for that right. Yeah black screen of fucking death on BlueStack (BS for short), and I do mean death! It fucking annihilated all usability of BS. Every app returned a black screen of go fuck yourself, nothing worked at all. So I did what every other nerd does when a program goes tits up on you…Uninstalled, Reboot and Reinstall. Yeah so that didn’t work the greatest, took forever to reinstall and sync. So it finally finished and I decided perhaps Google apps are a no go because they go off the internal android Gmail user ID that you have to input into a droid before you can even DL apps, I choose Instant Buttons because I love the app and all the nerdy/old/cool sounds it has on it, I click a button for a sound and nothing, not a freaking peep from my speakers. I checked all diagnostics and test (there’s sound coming from the puppies, just not from BS).

So again I’m hit with a problem that makes absolutely no sense! I continue to try the app and the damned RocketDock is ALWAYS up top, even pressing hid it just condenses to a single icon and it is constantly “On Top” of every window with no way to change it, Seriously!!!??? Are you fucking nuts!? You’re blocking every other apps center top bar and that includes my Chrome tabs! The only way to get back the top bar is to close out of BS 100% by going to the tray, right-click, and press quit. Pain in my ass is what that is, where is RocketDock’s famous auto hide feature seriously, I used to use that app in my Fapple desktop (Fake Apple)…. Another huge fucking no brainer flaw….. But lets continue to try and use this damned program with no sound and not 100% resolution and 20% of the apps on my tablet and phone….

So next app I open is one of my fav apps for keeping track of my television shows.. I get stuck on this screen for 20 min:

Ended up having to Ctrl+Shit+Esc and “End Process Tree” on all 3 individual processes BS uses… Yeah this is great fun right here…. I double click the icon to open back up BS and get this:

followed by this:

Had to FC the damned thing again and try again… Got it boot without issue on 3rd try.

Go to select an app (oh yeah, forgot to mention the app drawer dropdown doesn’t have a scroll feature at al)….

A few apps actually worked without crashing it, but that’s because pretty much every app that was ‘”allowed” to be useable were lame shitty apps that it would be 200% more efficient to just open in chrome. Since the web version work way better and has more features. Or they were utility apps that are useless on a PC (I just synced all apps to see how many would work).

Lastly I also ran into a problem with BS, I “quit” from the tray, but the RocketDock is still up there in my fucking way!~

So on top of all these problems I faced and issues with the GUI, BS was slower that molasses in the middle winter making BS nothing but another useless on my PC that I uninstalled right before writing this app

We have moved to the age of the digital empire and beyond, technology has grown so much and so fast (even just in the past 10 years). I still remember my old 8.5 in floppy drive PC, and the floppy disks were actually floppy! Technology has grown so much and so fast and reached the hands of just about everyone that’s in school setting; student syllabi in middle schools now say “no cell phones in class or they will be confiscated.” This to me is so crazy, that’s it’s reached even to the youth of our nations, but how is that in colleges I still see 99% of the students reading from a real textbook (an expensive textbook at that). I see 80% of students at colleges with laptops, on tables while they read these books; 75% with some form of smart phone, using it to text as they walk to class; and more and more students with these new tablets (iPad/Android/Windows/etc…).

This is going to be a write up and tutorial or sorts, if you like you can just skip the next few paragraphs to get the information on programs.

So the question I had for myself when I was gearing up to go back to school was simple, how can I save money on books and be as paperless as possible? I Already had a smartphone, it was just manner of finding out what’s & how’s of accomplishing this. So I sat down at my computer (yeah I don’t got a laptop lol) and started doing a bit of searching. I looked all over the interwebs to find the best of the best programs and setups to use; ideas that I wanted to make a reality.

So after all my research I went online and bought my own little tablet, (the newest and greatest out so far) the ASUS Transformer Prime. So I setup these programs, bought as many of my books for classes online (find a little more than half of them in digital format). I quickly stripped all the Amazon/B&N books of their DRM protection

they’re my books and by golly I’ll read them with any program I damn well please and the courts have upheld the ruling of; You bought, you own it, you can do what you want with it, just no reselling or giving giving it freely to others

You know I have been doing pretty great with being almost all digital! I Just need my keyboard dock for the tablet and I’ll be perfect… So, I have been doing just fine: recording class audio; taking notes (I’ve always taken notes and then rewrote them, it’s a study habit that works great); reading my books (this includes highlighting them, writing notes in them, and even having my computer/table/phone read them to me). I really have only run into 1 real snag with my setup and that’s the fact that the notes/highlights I put inside my digital text doesn’t sync with the rest (this is of course my fault/developers faults). The reason I say this is because I know I can buy an book/textbook through Amazon and have all notes and bookmarks sync to all Kindle devices, but that would limit me:

I wouldn’t have a Text-to-speech eReader;

If the book wasn’t on Amazon (or if you went the all B&N route) I would be S.O.L.;

I don’t want to be stuck with just 1 company, I hate being limited and I am willing to deal with that one problem for the sake of the freedom.

So by this point either you’re still reading and thinking “This sounds like a good idea, I can save some money on school books and be better organized digitally.” OR you’re thinking “Damnit, just tell me what programs are best man!” …. if neither of these 2 cover your current thought, comment/e-mail me or you stopped reading already lol.

So now to the grit of the programs, what’s the best and how do I get it?

Free your books that you purchased, go and downloadCalibre on your computer (PC is best). Then followthis guide to free your books from the corporate chains. **Note AZW4 files are just PDF locked inside an Amazon format and it’s easy to extract the PDF from it; if enough people comment asking how I’ll write a quick tutorial on how.

PC/MacReading: Nook Study on your PC or Mac (This is what I use to sort all my books by class, have TTS, a cool interface, and it just works; though the TTS is the blind TTS, meaning it reads even the menu to you) and just import all your books (PDF/ePUB/mobi) that you unlocked with Calibre. It is also important to point out a new guy called Blio that has a lot of the same features, and does some better, but only supports XPS format which is easy to convert to with a PC. Blio is cross platform as well, meaning you can have it on iOS, Android and PC (Sorry, no Mac version yet). The reason I mention Blio is the fact that it has a great TTS setup and interface, though can be a little laggy on older computers, and has all the features as the Nook Study, but works on more platforms; the downfall is it’s XPS only format, but that is easily overcome with an easy convert and the awesome books you can buy from them (they’re like animated talking story books!), they really should just allow standard ePUB format import and I hope they will.

**Note: It is important to mention, that Nook Study has the ability to purchases a lot your books you may need as well from the B&N store, these are mostly just PDF files locked by B&N with different extensions and can be unlocked as well, but there is a different method.

Phone/TabletReading: to be honest this more up to the device and owner, but I’ll give my thoughts.

UPDATE: I have recently stumbled across a better eReader for android called, Mantano and it is far superior to moon+ and supports PDF books/textbooks as well and will still read the PDF to you too. It has in my opinion a better interface and a lot better ebook support & TTS function, it doesn’t quite fully support ICS (android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich), but it does still work and it you don’t want the paid version, the free, ad supported, one still has all the same features as the paid.

iAnything: UseiBooks (I’ve been told it’s amazing and has TTS built in like Moon+)

BB/Palm/Windows Phones: You guys are kind of on your own here, I have no clue what the best one is anymore, I used to always use MobiPocket, but I heard it died.] **For PDF’s incase you have any, the best on Android isRepligo Reader.

Phone/Tablet Note Taking:Evernote is the real king, all you have to do is take the notes (or recording OR do both at the same time) and it syncs to the web, PC, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BB, Palm. It has so many different uses beyond notes that it is just an all around great app to always have. As well if you pair it in with the study section, it makes an unbeatable pair.

Phone/Tablet Studying: Now this is a new field here, there hasn’t before been a real good place where students can have there notes digitally, as well as create flash cards, find classmates, or borrow notes & study materials from classmates All online. Now we have the answer, and that’sStudyBlue (With Tablet & Phone Apps too)! They are just awesome, I’ve been working with them (by sending a lot of feedback and talking with the employees) trying to make their platform the absolute best there is around and once it’s good enough (just a few minor bugs need fixing) I actually plan to talk to my campus about using it for their disabilities services area. Going with StudyBlue will be worth it, especially if you have classes with me in them lol.

**Note: StudyBlue will sync up with your Evernote account, making keeping organized and automatically syncing your Evernote notes straight to your study place

So there is a quick overview of the programs that I use daily. And I have all my information on every device I use (I can even print from all my devices at home as well if I want). This is the era of the digital empire, embrace the ease of use, and stop sweating. Get organized, go paperless, and work & study from anywhere without having to hold a big bulky expensive textbook.

So as a closing note, I’m not sure how many people out there are as OCD organized as I am, but if so there is an APP for you on Android, iOS, Web/Chrome; it’s called My Home Work. And it is awesome, for organizing. It doesn’t currently sync to Google Calendars yet, but I’m going to pester them about it till they do lol. With this little app ($1.99/year) you can organize your class times, and schedule of when everything is (including study, reading, quizzes, HW, papers, presentations, and more).

One last thing, I am thinking of doing a specialized in depth post on each subject category and show they work. Would anyone be interested in reading that? I was thinking of maybe not only doing picture tutorials/screen shots, but maybe even working in a video or something.

**If there is an App that you think is better out there, especially in the case of Windows/BB Phones, let me know I’ll be glad to look into them and maybe even break out my old windows phone.**

So this day and age everyone from developers to students to Joe, want more digital storage space. The problem has always been cost & bandwidth (for those that share your stuff around the web). Most people tend to boxee or Dropbox, but now there is a better service for free unlimited bandwidth hosting and more space than Dropbox. It’s minus.com if you just create a public folder for say each type of file (images, docs, music, etc) and link the folder page it gives unlimited bandwidth for sharing, if you just hyperlink straight to the 1 file then at a certain point it gets throttled, but never turned off or suspended. There is a limit of items per folder but no folder limits. You can also set folders to public to be found in web searches or for people that follow your uploads to see.

And it’s all free. Also use my link and get instantly 1GB extra and everyone you refer with your link gives you more space, up to 50GB -> http://min.us/rucQ78U

So I’m currently using MIUI ROM on my Android Incredible and it has VoIP already integrated into the system for calling, i have that paired with PBXES.org and Google Voice for my VoIP setup. I was wondering if there are any other ROMs that possibly have more of complete integrated system with Google Voice and VoIP so that even the ROM’s default messaging app opens up google voice messages without needing service or the Google voice app; I don’t have actual service on my android phone I rely on wi-fi integration with google voice right now.